The New York Mets are finally getting their guy as David Stearns is on the cusp of becoming the team’s president of baseball operations, as first reported to ESPN’s Jeff Passan on Tuesday afternoon.
He will begin his tenure with the Queens ballclub following the 2023 season.
The 38-year-old New York native, who grew up a Mets fan, had risen up the ranks of highly-regarded executives around Major League Baseball by fashioning a consistent playoff contender with the Milwaukee Brewers as their president of baseball operations.
For a franchise that made the postseason just four times from 1969-2017, the built-by-Stearns Brewers are on the cusp of clinching their fifth playoff berth in the last six years, which included a trip to the NLCS in 2018 where they lost in seven games to the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Mets owner Steve Cohen has long been in pursuit of Stearns as he almost immediately expressed his desire to bring on a president of baseball operations when he took over the team ahead of the 2020 season. The Brewers, however, denied the Mets permission for an interview with Stearns and continued to do so through the life of his contract.
Following the 2022 season, Stearns stepped down as Milwaukee’s president of baseball operations but remained on as an advisor for the final year of his contract, which granted him the ability to talk to other teams on Aug. 1 of this year.
As expected, the Mets immediately reached out less than two months after Cohen once again made it known that his search to fill that position was still on after unsuccessfully addressing it for three years.
“If you want to attract good people to this organization, the worst thing you can do is be impulsive… I’ve been clear from Day 1 that I’m still looking for a president of baseball ops,” Cohen said on June 28. “Billy [Eppler] knows. I’ve had that conversation with him. He’s supportive. My view is it’s a very complex job and there’s a lot to do and it’s a lot on one person.”
Eppler, the team’s general manager, will work under Stearns in the Mets’ new hierarchy.
Given Stearns’ ability to create a contending team in a small market, doing so by building, evaluating, and at times finding sustainable talent, his philosophy appears to be a perfect fit for Cohen’s Mets, who took a step back amidst a disastrous 2023 season to revamp their farm system in hopes of creating a long-term winning team from the ground up.
